And here is the actual article detailing the academic consensus on illegal immigrant crime:

The Strange Career of Immigration in American Criminological Research Richard Rosenfeld University of Missouri—St. Louis Not too long ago, the link between immigration and crime was something of an article of faith among social scientists who presumed that immigrant concentration impeded communication and cooperation among community residents. In short, immigration increased social disorganization, as Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1969 [1942]) reported in their landmark research on Chicago neighborhoods. The resurgence of research on immigration and crime in the United States during the past two decades has upended the traditional view. A growing research literature has found that high levels of immigration are associated with lower levels of crime, especially criminal violence (see the policy essays by Martinez and Iwama [2014, this issue] and by Kubrin [2014, this issue]). Shaw and McKay’s pioneering research is open to differing interpretations (Huff-Corzine, Corzine, Laurikkala, and Olson, 2010), but the current consensus among social scientists is that, other things equal, immigration reduces violent crime. Two notable distinctions characterize recent studies of the connection between immigration and crime. The first is that between legal and illegal immigrants. The second is that between the impact on crime of immigration per se and the impact of immigration policy. If legal immigration does not increase crime, what about illegal immigration? It is not unreasonable to suppose that persons who violate immigration laws may be more crime prone than legal immigrants. And, if that is true, then does it not make sense to redouble efforts to identify and remove “criminal aliens?” The answer to the second question depends on the answer to the first. Why spend extra time and money requiring local authorities to check the immigration status of persons they detain if illegal immigrants are no more likely than legal immigrants to commit crime? The rationale for expedited local efforts to identify undocumented immigrants and hand them over to federal immigration authorities Direct correspondence to Richard Rosenfeld, Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of Missouri—St. Louis, 537 Lucas Hall, St. Louis, MO 63121 (e-mail: [email protected]). DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12088 C 2014 American Society of Criminology 281 Criminology & Public Policy Volume 13 Issue 2 Editorial Introduction Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime for possible deportation rests on the assumption that an appreciably large subset of them poses a serious threat to public safety in the United States. That is the focus of the research article by Treyger, Chalfin, and Loeffler (2014, this issue) and the excellent commentaries by Kubrin (2014) and by Martinez and Iwama (2014). If undocumented immigrants threaten public safety, then communities from which more undocumented immigrants have been removed should experience lower crime rates. Treyger et al. (2014) find no evidence that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Secure Communities program, the latest iteration in federal immigration policy, has reduced crime. Nor do they find that it has increased discriminatory policing in immigrant communities, as its critics allege, although they acknowledge that the evidence for this result is more limited. Secure Communities extends prior efforts to secure voluntary local cooperation in the enforcement of federal immigration policies by requiring that local law enforcement agencies check the immigration status of persons they have detained against federal databases and hold violators for further processing by ICE. The authors do not advocate ending Secure Communities. But immigration scholars Kubrin (2014) and Martinez and Iwama (2014) do recommend in their policy essays that Secure Communities be abolished. Kubrin (2014) and Martinez and Iwama (2014) believe that the case against the crime-reduction effects of Secure Communities is a strong one. But they go further. In combination with other ICE policies that involve local authorities in federal immigration enforcement, they argue that Secure Communities damages already strained relationships between immigrants and the police, making it less likely that immigrants will report crime to the police or cooperate in police investigations. In addition, they suggest that Secure Communities disrupts families and traumatizes children left behind when their parents or other family members are deported. In these and other ways, Secure Communities may well increase crime in immigrant communities. Treyger et al. (2014) find no evidence that the program increases crime, at least as reflected in city crime statistics, but Kubrin and Martinez and Iwama both offer compelling arguments for the disorganizing effects of Secure Communities, something of a mirror image of the disorganizing consequences of immigration itself that Shaw and McKay (1969 [1942]) documented. Research on immigration and crime in the United States has undergone two major phases and is now entering a third. The first phase was rooted in Shaw and McKay’s (1969 [1942]) research that attributed increased crime to the social disorganization borne of noncooperation and mistrust among residents in communities where immigrants were heavily concentrated. The second phase also linked crime to immigration but reversed the sign of the relationship. Now, if not a century ago, immigrant concentration reduces crime. Building on the second, the third phase shifts attention from immigration effects to those of immigration policy. It is too early to tell whether the new policy evaluations will confirm suspicions that, on balance, current immigration policies do more harm than good. But if the third phase proceeds along the lines proposed in the essays by Kubrin (2014) and by 282 Criminology & Public Policy Rosenfeld Martinez and Iwama (2014)—and matches the logic and rigor of the analysis of Secure Communities by Treyger et al. (2014)—before too long we should have a reasonably sound scientific basis for determining whether immigration policy is the culprit social scientists once thought immigration was. References Huff-Corzine, Lin, Jay Corzine, Minna Laurikkala, and Christa Polczynski Olson. 2010. Social disorganization, immigration, and violent crime: Revisiting the original Shaw and McKay. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco, CA. Kubrin, Charis E. 2014. Secure or insecure communities? Seven reasons to abandon the Secure Communities program. Criminology & Public Policy, 13: 323–338. Martinez, Ramiro Jr. and Janice Iwama. 2014. The reality of the Secure Communities program: Are our communities really becoming safer? Criminology & Public Policy, 13: 339–344. Shaw, Clifford R. and Henry McKay. 1969 [1942]. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Treyger, Elina, Aaron Chalfin, and Charles Loeffler. 2014. Immigration enforcement, policing, and crime: Evidence from the Secure Communities program. Criminology & Public Policy, 13: 285–322. Richard Rosenfeld is Founders Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. His research focuses on the police response to crime and the economic correlates of crime trends. He is a fellow and past president of the American Society of Criminology and currently serves on the Science Advisory Board of the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.